“I am not afraid,” says 80 year-old Lidiya Korolyova as she walks across a snow-covered field to check on a suspicious object. It might be a landmine, lying in wait among the trees not far from her village of Ozerne in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. When she first noticed it in 2014, she also saw a tripwire in the local forest while picking mushrooms. If she had triggered it without noticing, it would have detonated and probably taken her life.
In the past four and a half years, since the beginning of the ongoing armed conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists, around 1,900 people have been killed or injured in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions by landmines or other types of unexploded ordnance.
Civilians account for 42% of the victims.
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Source: Euronews